“All that is personal soon rots,” remarked W. B. Yeats: “it must be packed in ice or salt.” Yeats meant that poets who wrote about their own lives had to find sounds and symbols that might hold aesthetic and emotional interest, taken apart from the poets’ biographies (otherwise we would not care about the biographies, unless the poets got famous for something else). Yeats did not mean that poets had to get salty, or think all the time about how people rot. But some poets do those things too.
Liza Hudock—to judge by her first collection—is one of them. Her magnificently chilly, sonically self-assured, and justifiably, even righteously, bitter debut follows Yeats’s advice and still sounds nothing like him, nor like any other American with comparable gifts. It’s a blast of fresh air, stark and serious and drab and determined to flourish, like prairie flowers. Sometimes the poems find figures for Hudock’s experience in that hardy vegetation, or else in the beasts of the wood. When she encounters an ailing grizzly bear, “muddy / fur, slumped in a haze / of her own food’s // putrescence,” the ursine victim suggests the pity that all living things (even predators) can elicit. But the bear, laid low, projecting an ugly vulnerability, also suggests what psychologists call parentification—a term those of us who cherish Hudock’s work will either recognize, or need to learn.
Parentification takes place when a child, a teen, or a young person ends up supporting a parent, both emotionally and practically, and the parent encourages it, or makes it happen, making the child’s life into a years-long tunnel of unspoken obligation. Parentified kids grow up looking over their shoulders, wondering whether they’re allowed to hate, or repudiate, or accuse, their parents for taking the freedom of childhood away. Those kids may feel guilty for everything, compelled to analyze their every action for its smallest consequence, lest they get accused, or accuse themselves, of hurting others by acting selfish. They may grow up to accuse themselves, or others, constantly, of selfishness, to doubt every impulse to pleasure. That’s what happens to the adult Hudock in her ironically titled “Pastoral”:
We are walking uphill to a party,
swaying from the case of champagne we carry,
when it dawns on you that I could be more
proactive by standing outside the liquor store
with fentanyl test strips.
The claim wouldn’t hurt, nor spark a poem, if the poet had not entertained the same thought. Are all parties selfish? Is writing poetry selfish? Is any time not spent caring for others selfish? Parentified children who cannot fend off those questions get neither a childhood nor an adulthood (unless, perhaps, they become tireless EMTs). Any party becomes a walk uphill: “proactive,” a word few poets would deploy, becomes a word that signifies temptation. It also masks the quiet rhyme between “store” and “more.” “My Every Glimpse of the Permanent” remembers when the poet “vowed . . . to be / more like the Burgundy poached / pear, which offered no resistance / to the knife yet held its shape.” If only humans, too, could offer “no resistance,” no fight, to the people who hurt us, and yet still feel safe, and whole. Very few humans can do that: fewer still avoid emotional self-injury.
Hudock’s more literal poems show why. The collection begins in an unsafe home, where “disappointed / innocence . . . can harden / you into an artifact.” That’s the adult poet speaking to Paul Cezanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat—the boy looks wary, patient, perhaps grown up too early himself. Only after we see the boy in the waistcoat (it’s the first poem in the collection) do we hear the poet in propria persona, imagining the thoughts of her unwell, perhaps already dying, mother, the “you” in these lines: “It’s enough / to make you hate your own daughter” (note that line break). “You’re piled in blankets crocheted and donated,” “you’re carrying your pain like a hot rock,” and as for that daughter, “there she is waiting for you to say what it is you need.” Imagine if Frank Bidart never got to leave Bakersfield until his own mother passed: imagine if—like so many other adult children, especially those assigned female at birth—a poet with Bidart-like talents felt compelled, at fifteen or thirty-five, to care for a parent who treated them this way, as part nurse, and part extra limb.
Hudock doesn’t have to imagine it. Instead she nails down ways to represent it. Caring for a mother who can’t walk, “I touch her more sitting like this than I have in my entire life . . . She didn’t ask me for a mirror. She asked me for a match.” The mother craves a metaphorical cigarette, perhaps a literal cigarette (don’t smoke, kids). The poet might prefer a muse of fire, wanting to burn the whole place down. Kids, and adults, in that impossible situation rarely burn the place down (nor should they, in general). Instead they learn to feel numb, and that numbness—that mood—comes through in Hudock’s dry lines: “We used to want // to feel something. We sat in dirt and waited / for bugs to crawl over our skin. We said / punch me as hard as you can.” Even that want, the poem implies, would improve on the mood of this moment, now. Again, check out that line break: “We used to want.” It’s as if we don’t want at all, any more.
Hudock finds symbols that bring back such difficult wants. For example, “I dug a shallow trench / about six feet long”—the length of a human body—for “tulip bulbs.” Another poet might focus on the tulips, their future petals, the hues they might show. Instead, Hudock keeps her focus on the trench, which let her practice death and rebirth: “I went back at night with my / sleeping bag,” and “the cat found me / and sat on my chest, sphinx- / like,” a feline, unpredictable, version of the “world / that loved me first.” Her childhood world, at its best, is a trench with a cat to keep her warm, or a “fur coat” with sketchy holes: “a family of mice must have lived inside.”
In such a trench (to quote Yeats again) her ladders start. Some of those ladders lead to a mother’s “death rattle”: “It’s what I heard when I was five / and a man played the spoons on my head.” Listen again (as usual) for Hudock’s low-key power over sound: the first line’s iambic, the second in anapests. That’s how it sounded “when Death got into my house, / like a pigeon, by special means, and took up the whole / room with its wings.” An allegory, for sure, but not one for her own death: it stands, instead, for parentification, and for feeling overwhelmed. In any case, “It’s too much to ask an allegory of a hungry girl.”
That sense of excessive, unlimited responsibility, and of the hunger that responsibility creates, arches through the whole collection. But it’s not the only game in this tough town. Hudock’s work stands out for her fine ear, stark and serious (think Frank Bidart), and for the double handful of poems whose antipastoral sadness coalesces in fauna, in flora, in fruit. It also stands out for its echoes of self-accusation, its compulsion to find needs and carcasses just where another poet might see bright rebirth. Looking at nonhuman nature, Hudock comes away with scenes of neglect, compulsion, and decay, “mostly watching, mostly useless”: “the bog frozen, / covered in deer tongue,” “mown acre / cropped close as a taut sheet,” like hospital corners, or shrouds on the dead. (Deer tongue is a tall, spade-shaped wild grass that prefers reclaimed, poor, or polluted soils: a survivor.)
When Hudock describes something that seems conventionally beautiful, she makes it alarming, or unalluring, or ugly. Only in things that seem, to other people, ugly can she find ways to see this world as beautiful, as in “The Pumpkin My Best Friend”: “I love a pumpkin,” she writes, “for the same reason some people love a sonnet—/ it has the rough proportions of a human head . . . Let my pumpkin have the effect of a head / on a spike.” This time her anapests suggest momentum. The fruits of the earth seem friendly, if not pretty, when they give her something to throw at her enemies, and she finds it easier to notice enemies, rivals, obligations, and obstacles than to discern her friends.
It’s not the least of Hudock’s many virtues that she writes about friendship and tenderness anyway, and beautifully. Such topics do not come naturally to this poet, any more than vowel-driven melodies come naturally to a poet so skillful with rough anticlimax and dissonance. Everything becomes a struggle for a poet who learned too early to distrust gifts, who had to fight her way through to the kind of autonomy that ought to feel like a birthright. “My mother gave gifts like a child, presenting you with her favorite possession rather than something you want.” Such a mother sees her children, and her friends, as extensions of herself. That kind of narcissism leads to parentification, and it leads many adults (some of my friends among them) to make clean breaks with the people who claimed to raise them. But when a parent is dying, and requires care, those breaks may seem morally wrong.
Hudock’s adult life unfolds, partially and gradually, in a handful of poems involving companionship, and in another handful about a brother now or recently incarcerated in Michigan. She has survived his unwanted attention too: “What a little weed,” she calls herself. “I want to live no matter what. // When my brother choked me it was lights out / for a second, then more life.” Long live the weeds (as another poet exclaimed). Hudock’s escape from that house, and her survival, and her brother’s fate, and her sister’s death (some poems appear to address her late sister), underline the value of physical freedom, for all of us, but especially for her. She cannot stop thinking about “when you need to pack quickly”: “I am trying / to forget my hate.” Sometimes physical freedom itself disorients her, a “phantom / pain in phantom limbs,” as in “Wool Washing”:
Awake
with nothing to tend to, I go
down in the dark to the creek,
an anachronism with no
laundry and no score to settle.
There she watches the cows “with their pink / dexterous tongues,” content to live in herds, obeying orders that nobody has to give. Does “go” rhyme with “no”? Maybe: but the euphony, as usual, takes second place to the rhythm, forceful as she heads to the creek, enjambed on “no,” stopped cold by the water’s placidity.
Such poems take to their own strong hearts Yeats’s salty advice, finding symbols and sounds and making them stand on their own, even as they also trace a real person’s tough path. Hudock’s visual attention, and her cadence, set her fortunately apart from the spate of first books, five or ten years ago, that came off as neo-confessional, or as Glück-lite: she’s less apothegmatic than the late Nobelist, more given to sensory detail than Bidart, and far drier, far less melodic than our greatest living “confessional” writer, Laura Kasischke, whose goals recall Hudock, but whose sounds and details never do.
Hudock, in an interview, cites her own influences as Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Wanda Coleman, and a brace of far older writers in translation (Dante, for example), none of whom could have taught her the kind of control that this first collection represents. It’s an array of prairie perennials, a monument that’s a shelter that’s also a way to freedom, like a beloved, well-kept Airstream trailer, or like Hudock’s longest meditation on a natural symbol, “Hummingbird-Moth.” That insect—ugly to others, attractive to her—“feeds in hordes, / freshly emerged from the shallow grave / it digs for itself,” pupating until its cell-soup “could become anything, / yet becomes what it always becomes.”
It’s a rare virtue for a first book, knowing its own path (like the moth) so completely, and it’s a relief to see that—having mastered this path, this style, so well—this poet might not stay there. Hudock served in the Coast Guard, though nothing here shows her at sea. She’s also, on the evidence of these poems, set for the kind of reinvention that more often comes to poets three books, or two decades, later. “The Reveille years had a theme color,” she told an interviewer in 2025, “and it was yellow—even though yellow is a happy color and that was a sorrowful time. Now, I’m rejoicing, I have a baby, and the prevailing color of the poems is purple.” Maybe we’ll see her purple poems of motherhood—or poems about shipboard life, or about new friends—soon. For now, we have her pale, yellow, tough Reveille. More poets—and fewer lives—should turn out so well-made and so rough, so wise so early, so clear and so good.
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Reveille. By Liza Hudock. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2025. 96 pages. $18.95.
